


A Word That Means the World to Me

by justheretobreakthings



Series: Gentron: Legendary Friendships 2020 [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Episode: s06e02 Razor's Edge, Family, Foster Kid Keith (Voltron), Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Keith & Krolia (Voltron) on the Space Whale, Mother-Son Relationship, Past Child Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-03
Updated: 2020-08-03
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:48:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25693063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justheretobreakthings/pseuds/justheretobreakthings
Summary: During the first night camping on the space whale with his newfound mother, Keith has a lot on his mind.
Relationships: Keith & Krolia (Voltron)
Series: Gentron: Legendary Friendships 2020 [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1863199
Comments: 12
Kudos: 106
Collections: Gentronweek





	A Word That Means the World to Me

It had been an exhausting day. From the infiltration of Ranveig’s base and the release of the superweapon on Trugg, to meeting Krolia and discovering her relation to himself, flashes of memories that did not belong to him playing out and filling in gaps of his life that he had wondered about for as long as he could remember, to winding up on this space whale and fighting their way to safety amidst a wilderness that seemed to actively want them dead.

The fact that Keith hadn’t collapsed long before now, drained and overwhelmed and unable to handle one more bomb being dropped on him today, could only be attributed to divine intervention. That, or one hell of an adrenaline rush. Perhaps some combination of both.

Regardless, it had been a blessed relief to finally make shelter in the grotto they’d found that seemed to be secure from the wildlife they’d been doing their best to avoid since landing here, and it was all Keith could do to stay on his feet as they made the fire to keep them warm for the night and set crude traps in the foliage for any beasts that may end up deciding to venture into their little campsite for a meal.

But finally, _finally,_ he could now collapse on the ground and let his eyes shut, could finally get to sleep.

And yet, he found he couldn’t.

It was peaceful now, the most peaceful the world around him had been since before he’d been sent on this mission that had changed his life forever. The sky had dimmed, though not darkened as fully as a night back on Earth; they actually weren’t sure whether this _was_ the whale’s version of night or not, but quibbling or the day-night cycle of a world they had never been to before was pointless, and they were both tired enough that they probably would have been able to sleep contentedly under a blazing noonday desert sun if they’d had to. The fire they had built was comfortingly warm against the chill outside the cave, the crackling and snapping of the kindling mixing with the wind rustling the surrounding plants to provide ambient sound that should have been perfectly soothing. Even the ground in the cave, though firm, was still smooth and cool enough that Keith should be able to sleep on it with minimal discomfort; he’d certainly faced worse sleeping conditions before.

So it wasn’t the environment that was keeping him from sleeping. It was much more likely, then, that it was simply his own head. And considering how much was reeling through it right now, it was hardly surprising. How does one manage to relax enough to fall asleep after everything that had happened? Everything he’d done and seen and learned in such a short time?

He peeled open his eyes, giving up on his efforts to sleep, and let his gaze find Krolia instead. She, it seemed, wasn’t having the same insomnia he was, since she was slumped against the opposite cave wall, eyes shut and head lolling, chest heaving slowly up and down in deep slumbering breaths. Even in her sleep her arms were crossed, and her brows were tilted in a hint of the scowl that seemed to have a near permanent place on her face. A face with a slim, pointed jaw, deep-set almond eyes, a slender nose and thin lips.

His face. The face he’d gotten from Krolia. The face he’d gotten from his mother.

He shut his eyes again, turning his head back toward the wall of the cave. It still hadn’t sunk in, and he doubted it would any time soon: he had a mother. Krolia was his mother. His mother was here with him.

None of those facts seemed real, and they repeated over and over in his head until the word stopped meaning anything and just became a sound.

When he was little, he had wanted a mother. Badly. It wasn’t that he hadn’t been happy with just his dad, of course, because he had been. But he had seen mothers in the picture books that filled out the shelf in his bedroom, and watched them on old videos on their little television in the den, the handful of movies that they had in the house and that he watched over and over until the tape got worn and the picture became distorted by static.

He had asked his dad about it before, asked about getting a mother, and his dad had assured him that he had one, but she just wasn’t here right now. That she was beautiful and strong and would love to see him, but he didn’t know when that would be. She might show up the very next morning, or it might be years from now, when Keith was all grown up.

Keith had asked once if it might be never, and his dad had been quiet before asking if Keith would like an extra big bedtime snack tonight, and Keith had forgotten about the question entirely.

His face was starting to grow chilly here in the cave, so he rolled over so that he was facing the fire. Though he squeezed his eyes shut, red still danced against his eyelids from facing the flames. He tried to let those flames help him fall to sleep, convincing himself that they reminded him of the Red Lion, the frantic energy she put toward protecting him and the warm embrace she gave him during their downtime.

Although now that he had been thinking of his dad, it was a little harder to associate those flames with anything else. He had noticed that, even in the short time he had been on this space whale, memories, even old ones that should have gone soft and fuzzy by now, seemed more eager to leap forward to the front of his mind, and were clearer when they got there. Must have been helpful when Krolia had been showing him those moments from her time on Earth, but was decidedly less useful when it came to settling his mind and going to sleep.

Because now, his mind was whirling through his own memories. Snapshots of his time in the desert with his father, just the two of them - now with an eerie undertone to them since he now knew why they kept to themselves out there, so far from the town where the firehouse was, why Keith hadn’t been sent to daycare or kindergarten and instead his supervision while his dad was working had been entrusted to a select few of his father’s friends, why they’d so often kept the curtains in the front room closed. His case workers in the past had described him as having been ‘undersocialized’ in early childhood. Now, Keith wondered how they’d react if they found out that the reason for that had been that they were lying low to better avoid detection from hostile aliens.

He shivered, prying his eyes open. The chill of the cave wasn’t making it any easier to fall asleep, and it seemed only half of him could be properly warmed at once, since as he faced the fire his back prickled from the cold. With a sigh, he rolled over again, his back to the fire, dreading the way he knew he was going to wind up tossing and turning all through the night to distribute the warmth.

He hated sleeping in the cold. A lot of people, he knew, preferred to sleep somewhere that was too cold than somewhere that was too hot, with the reasoning that you could always pile on more blankets in the cold, while there was only so much you could remove in the heat. And while Keith saw the logic in that, he very seldom felt overheated in sleep to the point where simply sleeping only under sheets rather than covers wasn’t sufficient; maybe it was just a preference his body had adapted from living so long in the desert heat. Besides, they didn’t have any blankets or bedding at all right now to add or take away, so the point was moot.

When he had been little, he recalled, during those rare desert nights that were actually cold, he used to slip into his dad’s bedroom and climb into bed with him. Wrapped in those protective arms, warm and solid secure, with the soft thump of his heartbeat against his back and slow rhythm of his breathing in his ear, Keith would be lulled to sleep within what felt like seconds.

Cautiously he opened his eyes and tilted his head around, glancing at the slumbering figure of Krolia. It wasn’t as if he had never slept nestled against anyone else since his dad had died. There were a couple of instances at the Garrison, when he had been sick or had been dealing with nightmares, that he had fallen asleep in Shiro’s arms. He had nearly died of embarrassment the first time it happened, in his dorm room after Shiro had been comforting him after an anxiety attack, but Shiro had waved away his stammering apologies, insisting that if Keith ever needed anyone around to just hold onto, he was up to the task. And Hunk, as he had learned from a handful of game nights at the Castle that ran late into the night-cycle, was a sleep-hugger, and more than once had unconsciously pulled Keith in like a stuffed animal to cuddle with as he dozed. And although Keith would never admit it out loud to anyone, the experience of being Hunk’s surrogate teddy bear was actually surprisingly cozy.

Right now, though, he didn’t have Shiro, or Hunk, or his dad. There was just Krolia. Arms still crossed as she slept, the ghost of a scowl still etched across her face. Even in sleep, she was like steel, firm and severe. Almost untouchable, which surely was ridiculous, because she was his _mother_. He had witnessed her memories of him mere vargas ago, holding him in her arms, cradling and rocking him, tucking him in to sleep and kissing his cheek.

But that had been him as a baby, so far removed from who he was now. Eighteen years was certainly long enough for that motherly affection to fade. Besides, when had _mothers_ ever been any sort of comfort to him before?

Because he’d had mothers, sort of. Just like he’d always wanted. It was as if he had wished it on a monkey’s paw, and in order to grant his wish, the universe had taken his dad in a fire and placed him in the hands of a social worker who, in turn, handed him over to his ‘new mother’.

He had learned, finally, what it was like to have a mother, and it hadn’t been what he’d thought it would be. The ‘new mother’ wouldn’t let him call her ‘mom’ or ‘mother’ or ‘mama’, just her actual first name. This mother wouldn’t let him hold her hand, or put his head in her lap to go to sleep, or let him climb onto her back with his arms around her shoulders to go on a piggyback ride around the house, or tug on her shirt to get her attention. And the first night he had tried to climb into her bed after a nightmare, she had marched him right back into his own bedroom and told him to stop being a baby.

Then, he had been pulled out of her house, and placed in a new one. With a new ‘mother’. And a father this time. Keith had been wary. He didn’t like that people were trying to force a new father onto him, when he had loved the one he’d already had before, and the last mother they’d tried to give him hadn’t exactly endeared him to the concept of another.

This one seemed to try, though, had insisted on being called ‘mom’ and had let Keith hold her hand. He liked that. This mom was the opposite of the former, protective where the other had been negligent, attentive where the other had been dismissive. But the longer he stayed with them, the more he realized the opposite wasn’t so great either. He could do nothing without her eyes on him. She would walk him to school, holding his hand the entire time, refusing to let go even if his hand was hot and sweaty or her grip was too tight. She watched his every pencil stroke as he worked on his homework, monitored every bite of his food. He could not open a book or turn on a television show or step into the backyard to play without her monitoring him every moment. He wasn’t allowed to shut the door to his bedroom, or shower without assistance, or pick out his own clothes. The whole time he lived in that house, it felt like not a single minute went by where there weren’t eyes on him.

That house hadn’t lasted either. None of them had. He had cycled through enough mothers that he eventually stopped remembering all their names and faces. And barring short stints in group homes and his eventual placement in juvenile hall, he always had one mother or another. Often there was a father too, sometimes just a mother. Never just a father, and never two mothers; considering everything in the foster system that was broken, prejudice was just one more problem among many. And there were _many_.

From house to house, he had learned a lot about mothers. He learned that some of the mothers he was placed with actually came close to the image that had been built for him in picture books and cartoons and the way his dad had talked about his mom. Some mothers did seem to try to make him feel welcome, were patient with him, did their best to help him feel at home and safe. But none of them decided to keep him around forever, and that missing step seemed like it should have been the most important one.

And as Keith lay exhausted on that cave floor, his mind shuffled through everything else he’d learned about mothers, reminding him in vivid detail when he’d learned it. He’d learned that some mothers yell. He’d learned that some mothers hit. He’d learned that some mothers are only mothers to the kids who were biologically theirs, and that anyone else was an intrusion and a burden. Some mothers had rules for everything, and harsh punishments for every infraction. Some mothers had no rules, let him do whatever he wanted, and in fact barely seemed to notice his existence. Some mothers thought it was their job to fix things that were broken, and Keith was broken, and didn’t he see that they were doing what’s best for him, didn’t he understand that having a mother was a privilege and he should be grateful that he’s allowed under their roof, let alone into their family, this was all for his own good -

“Keith.”

He seemed to be flicking through memories as if they were a slideshow, mothers whose faces he’d thought he had forgotten - a mother telling him if he didn’t eat her cooking, he didn’t eat at all, even after he’d tried to explain that he couldn’t eat what she’d made because it hurt his stomach and made him throw up; a mother’s hand striking his face, her wedding ring cutting a gash into his cheek; a mother on the phone when he was supposed to be in his room studying but had snuck out for water, crying and asking the person on the other end why she’d gotten stuck with this monster of a child, how she was supposed to handle a kid who fought at school and wouldn’t speak with her, why couldn’t she have gotten a _good_ kid instead -

_ “Keith!” _

His eyes opened.

He hadn’t even realized he had fallen asleep, and the exhaustion from the nightmares made it feel like he hadn’t at all. It had been a while since he’d had nightmares of his old foster homes; nowadays most of his nightmares involved Shiro vanishing or getting taken down in a battle with Voltron or stumbling upon mortally-wounded teammates desperately asking why he hadn’t been there to save them. He’d started to think his foster homes were something he’d finally started to put behind him.

That was the thing about things being behind you, he supposed. It’s that much easier for them to take you by surprise.

As he pulled himself from sleep, he focused on what had woken him, and to his surprise, Krolia was kneeling next to him, gazing down at his face. Her brows were furrowed, arced in a way that was softer than the glare Keith had been growing accustomed to, and her eyes were intense as they bore into him.

“Um,” Keith said. “Sorry, we getting up?”

He started to shift, ready to roll onto his feet, but Krolia stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. “No,” she said. “It’s not morning. We haven’t been sleeping long.”

“Oh. So, um, why…?”

“You were dreaming,” Krolia said.

Keith dropped his gaze in embarrassment. “Right. Sorry, I - I was making noise, wasn’t I? I, um, didn’t mean to wake you.”

“You weren’t making noise.”

She held his gaze as he looked back up, her own still intense, as if there were something she was trying to convey to him without words, but Keith couldn’t figure out the message. “So, uh,” he said. “How did you know - ?”

“Who were they?” Krolia cut him off.

Keith blinked. “Who?”

“The people. In your memories.”

It took a moment for Keith to realize what she meant, and when he did, he felt his face heat as his embarrassment deepened. This dimensional rift, it seemed, was more than happy to share Krolia and Keith’s memories between the two of them when they came to mind. She had seen those flashes he had experienced when they first got here, and now it seemed that when bad memories haunted his nightmares, she could see those too. He would definitely need to learn how to control what memories the rift shared, and he tried desperately now to clear his mind of anything he wouldn’t want Krolia to see.

But there was still the matter of those nightmares she _had_ seen to deal with. “It’s nothing,” he said. “Um, nothing you need to worry about.”

“They were hurting you, weren’t they.” It was worded as a question, but spoken as a statement.

Keith shrugged. “It happens.”

“It shouldn’t have,” Krolia said, and Keith resisted the urge to flinch at the venom that was starting to creep into her voice. “Was that back on Earth?”

“Yeah,” Keith admitted. “But it’s not a big - ”

“Who were they?” she demanded.

Keith took a deep breath. “Foster parents,” he said softly. When Krolia looked confused, he continued, “Just, people that I was placed with after Dad died. The state gives people a bit of money to take care of kids who aren’t biologically theirs, and, um - ” He cleared his throat. “The vetting system isn’t all that great. I guess a lot of people sign on for the wrong reasons or - or just really shouldn’t be trusted with kids, ever.” He paused, chewing at his lip, before adding, “I haven’t lived with any of them for a while, though. It’s fine. I mean, it’s - it’s whatever. It’s over.”

Silence rang between them before Krolia let out a sigh, her shoulders sagging as she seemed to deflate. “I’m so sorry.”

Keith raised a brow. “For what?”

“I hadn’t realized. I - I had left Earth to keep you safe. I hadn’t - it hadn’t occurred to me that there could be danger there too.”

“I wasn’t in danger.”

“They hurt you.”

“Well, I lived, didn’t I?” He’d tried to make it sound lighthearted, dismissive, but he didn’t think he succeeded. Krolia was giving him a searching, apprehensive look, and Keith wasn’t sure how he felt about that. “Look, it’s really not a big deal.”

Krolia shook her head, but she dropped her gaze, and Keith hoped that meant she was done arguing with him over it. “I’d like to make it up to you,” she said. “The time you spent hurting. I can’t undo that, but I can try to make sure it doesn’t happen again. I - I’m not going to ask you to think of me as your mother again. Not now. I think I’ll have to earn that, won’t I.”

Keith didn’t answer her for a long moment, and when he did, it was just to sigh and lay his head back down. “I… I just want to go to sleep, Krolia. Could we talk about this some other time?”

“All right.”

Keith closed his eyes back up and tried to steady his breathing, waiting for Krolia to assume he’d fallen asleep. Instead, she stayed and watched him, and after a couple of minutes, she softly said, “It’s cold in here.”

Keith said nothing.

“Would you mind, Keith, if I slept next to you?”

His mouth went dry, and he had to clear his throat before answering, “I - I guess that would be fine.”

And next thing he knew, Krolia was on the ground beside him, one arm draped over him and her breath at his neck. And she was warm and her arm was like a safeguard, and it should have been so strange because she was essentially a stranger, but somehow it was… okay.

“Last time I held you,” Krolia said, voice barely a whisper, “I could lift you in just one hand. You were so small. And helpless.”

“I’m not helpless anymore,” Keith mumbled.

“I know.”

The fire crackled, twigs of kindling snapping as they burned, and Keith and Krolia lay in silence on the cave floor. Krolia moved her hand up and down, just a little, a soft enough motion to be soothing and not jostle him, and slowly Keith could feel himself begin to fade back into slumber.

“Good night, Keith,” Krolia said.

“Good night, Mom,” Keith replied.

**Author's Note:**

> [I tumble.](https://justheretobreakthings.tumblr.com/)


End file.
